MYSTERY MEAT NAVIGATION

What the !$## at ! at !!!!!!

Mystery Meat Navigation: An Introduction. People are always
asking me, "What's the best site on the Web?" My response
is "There is no best site because the best site is the one that
as soon as someone clicks a link to go there, money is automatically
sucked out of their wallet."

Since we can't design such a site with the current crop of design tools,
how do we get customers to give us money? They have to be able to find
products on your site they're willing to buy. Notice the word "find"
because it's the key concept. The two ways people "find" their
way around your site is by using your search engine or by navigating
based on the links you've created. Quite frankly, search engines suck
and I'll talk about them in a future article. The second way people
find items on your site is through your site's navigational scheme.

Please Note: All links open new windows. To return, close the
new window.

Bad Navigation. According to a recent
research paper, "39 percent of test shoppers failed in their
buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate."
Imagine what would happen if your bricks and mortar business
lost almost 40% of its potential customers because they walked in your
store and couldn't find what they were looking for because your aisles
were built in the shape of a maze? Imagine if Wal-Mart stores were built
this way:

Mystery Meat Navigation. There's a new style of
bad navigation which is becoming popular and it's been given several
names here at WPTS -- "Saturnic Navigation," "Non Intuitive
Navigation" and, most recently, "Mystery Meat Navigation."
This genre of site navigation is based on JavaScript rollovers and it's
confusing and risks alienating your customers.

Mouse over the images below to see the problem.

For various reasons, I'm calling this type of navigation "Mystery
Meat Navigation" (MMN) and I'd like to make it clear why it's bad.
Web design is not about art, it's about making money. To make money,
you don't want to design a site that might confuse someone. You want
your visitors to quickly find what they're looking for and then write
you a check. MMN confuses people because you have to find the navigational
system and then mouse over each image to determine where it will take
you. Someone at the Web Design 99/Seattle conference said, "When
you go to Wal-Mart and buy a microwave, they've got your money. When
you're on the Web it's different because every click is a decision point
and people are ruthless. If they don't like what they see or they're
confused, they go somewhere else." MMN is confusing. Confusion
is bad.

The real problem with MMN is it's very seductive -- it looks cool and
it's used on a lot of sites which win design awards. Because there's
no long strings of text, MMN makes the page look "cleaner"
because there's more white space.

I settled on the name "Mystery Meat" because it's a term
American kids are first exposed to in high school. There's always this
one meat selection that isn't readily identifiable and it's often disguised
by a layer of thick gravy. The dish becomes known as "Mystery Meat"
because you're not sure what's going to happen when you eat the meat.

Warning #2 Please Note:All links on this page open new windows.
To return, close the new window.

The area shown inside the blue circle contains the rollover links they
use for their navigation. In Saturn's case, you had to memorize each
and every link because there were no regular links.

Another way to look at MMN is that it's like the old game called "Concentration"
or "Memory" where you have to match two pictures together.
The trick is to have an excellent memory. I ran across a reference to
the Claudia Schiffer memory game and, in many ways, the game is almost
like MMN. You have to remember the location of the right picture. Claudia's
game can be found here.

Why MMN is really bad. When you drive down the road, you don't
see road signs which wait for you to touch them before they tell you
what they say (mouse over this image for an example). Well, now that
I think about it, Seattle has a lot of MMN.

Hopefully, the above image demonstration should make it perfectly clear
why MMN sucks more than a Kirby vacuum cleaner. It's stupid, stupid,
stupid -- and dangerous.

At Internet World New York back in October,
Michael Willis and I showed the above picture. Everyone laughed loudly.
We then showed them other Saturnic sites like Memorex, Volkswagen, Saturn,
and others. No one laughed. Then we showed them what
Amazon.com would look like if it used MMN. Lots of laughter. Then
Michael made the profound comment. "Gee. You didn't laugh when
we showed you Volkswagen
and it's just as bad as this." You could see the "They got
me" looks on the faces of the audience. I then made the comment,
"There's not enough drugs in Seattle to make Amazon's designers
use this technique." Laughter. Using MMN doesn't mean you use drugs.
It just means you're a dope.

Addendum. With a concept so horrible as
to rupture time and space, I cajoled one of the WPTS Bulletin Board
regulars to make the Amazon.com Mystery Meat Navigation example even
worse and more stupid. zz0zz wrote a JavaScript, which works in IE 4.x
and Netscape 4.x and above, where the rollovers are random. Note:
Because the images are different sizes, it's going to look pretty funky.
(Different image sizes is a frequent problem with folks trying to create
rollovers for the first time.) Just mouse over a button, mouse out,
and mouse over the same image again. Try it with the other buttons.
So far, no one on the Web has been stupid enough to use this technique
-- yet. But I can see someone doing it for real where the buttons are
the same size. Since you're seeing it here first, I want to name this
bad technique the Flanders/zz0zz rollover in honor of the person
who came up with the crummy concept and the person who brought the monster
to life. This monster was tested in IE 4.x and NS 4.x and above. May
not work in other browsers. Your mileage will vary.

Examples of Mystery Meat Navigation

(Warning #3 -- I've made the warning longer
because people were missing the earlier warnings. Please Note:All
links on this page open new windows. To return, close the new window.
The reason I do this is because people complained that when they hit
the back button, they had to scroll back down to the next link and it
was wasting time and I agree with them. I think I only open new windows
on this page and nowhere else on the site. Of course, people now complain
that I open too many windows.)

Unfortunately, there are just bunches and bunches of sites which use
MMN. Here are a few that the readers of Web Pages That Suck have discovered
and sent in to me. Thankfully, a number of the sites have decided MMN
is not the way to go and they've eliminated it.

Recent Mystery Meat I was correctly taken to task for incorporating
newer mystery meat sites within the article. Bad, Vincent, Bad. No box
of donuts.

Outoftheblue.com
-- Real life use of the Flanders/zz0zz rollover. The Flanders/zz0zz
rollover was supposed to be a joke. The thinking was that nobody
in their right mind would ever use the technique because it's the "Mys"
in Mystery Meat Navigation. Well, it's being used, in one form on a
design house.

Their technique isn't quite as horrible as ours -- thank
goodnes we're still the champions -- but it still sucks. Move your mouse
over one of the squares. Move it out. Move it back in. It changes. It's
a very nice implementation of a very sucky technique.

Older Mystery Meat

Volkswagen.
Not content to let Saturn commit aesthetic suicide alone, the European
division of Volkswagen's motif draws me to the phrase "Casting
pearls before swine." They've also taken MMN to a new, low level.
I called it the "blurred navigation buttons."

Smirnoff
-- Seeing double. Well, the folks at Smirnoff have created two different
Mystery Meat navigation areas on this page. I'll drink to that. The
page is also a little bloated at 87K.

Saab
story. This is the third car site that uses MMN. It's pretty weird.
Move your mouse over the images and the text links below light up.

Audi
-- must be a car thing. Gee, we've got MMN at Saab, Volkswagen,
and now, Audi. Maybe MMN found its home with car companies. This site
takes forever to load (well, it is overseas), and has the most bizarre
navigation scheme. I'm almost afraid to show it because I just know
designers are going to use it as their next "new thing."

CNN.
Not CNN!!!! I love these guys, but somebody sent me the following e-mail:

Like everyone else, CNN is running a "Next Millenium" special. Apparently
they think wordless javascript rollovers are part of the future as
well.

I know you have a lot of samples already, but this one just infuriated
me...It's a pretty picture! Mouse over it and stuff pops up! Mouse
back over it and it goes away! Can you see all your options at any
given time? Apparently not!

Minolta USA's homepage contains the most pointless use of MMN I've
seen, it's just like your
version of amazon.com on MMN, but here it's not intended as a
joke!

Fray-ed nerves.
There are two folks I'm willing to bet are responsible for MMN. My second
choice would be Wired magazine. My first choice would be Fray.com.
Derek M. Powazek is a freaking HTML god and is responsible for a lot
of cool HTML we take for granted -- well, Salon Magazine allegedly
took
some of it for granted. On the plus side of the ledger, Powazek
was on the design team that created the world's
best splash page -- and you know how much I hate splash pages. Nevertheless,
Mystery Meat is Mystery Meat.

Canon.
You shouldn't use Mystery Meat navigation, but if you've got one of
"those" bosses who insists on using it, at least offer an
alternative. The folks at Canon are smart enough to understand the importance
of giving visitors a proper choice on their PowerShot camera page. Their
home page offers
an HTML
version and a Flash 4 version and, of course, the Flash version
is total Mystery Meat. In fact, they're using that horrible sniper-scope
technique I first saw at Audi's site (move your mouse over the gold
cube). When everybody has high-end DSL, pages like this won't be such
a problem -- but we're not there yet. The Flash 4 version is the Daily
Sucker.

Elle Magazine. It
took some time for me to figure out where the Mystery Meat links were
located on this magazine for women. Mouseover each letter of the magazine's
name E-L-L-E to see the MMN.

As the person who submitted this site stated:

For a hideous amalgam of Mystery Meat rollovers, regular rollovers
and real links, please visit Elle Magazine. This site has links to
some features, rollovers at the bottom which, while a little too cute,
are harmless, and then other "secret" rollovers. One could miss them
entirely, thinking the regular links were all there is At least when
there are no links, one fiddles about and might find the hidden rollovers.

Fox Kids --
corrupting our youth. The future Web designers of the world are
being corrupted by the Fox Kids Web site. The whole front page is Mystery
Meat and 107K in size.

The
Matrix. A very successful movie has a very MMN system. By the way,
is there any movie Web site (besides Blair Witch Project) that's worth
the time to visit? I've never seen better looking sites that had no
content.

Irishphotostock.
Proof that bad design is not limited to America. Here's some Irish MM
for your dining pleasure.

Sarah
McLachlan. Ah, the lovely songstress who gave hope to drummers throughout
the world (she married her drummer). As the person who suggested this
site stated: "As much as I love Sarah McLachlan, her Web page is
sadly akin to deep sea diving without the oxygen."

Gravis
makes joysticks and game pads and bad navigational aids on the right
side of the screen. True Mystery Meat.

I found this site in the 1999 Communication Arts Interactive Design
annual as one of 45 award winning interactive media projects. Many
of the websites featured in the Annual would most certainly win an
award from you also, as the link to Potlatch Papers demonstrates.

Feed
magazine is a popular online cultural magazine. However, this page
is definitely Mystery Meat. Note the charming buttons on the left. Also,
you need to remember it's an e-zine and those folks have an artists
exclusion pass.

Bobby
"The Brain" Heenan. When I was a kid back in the late
50s and early 60s I loved pro wrestling. The TV station where my father
was the Director of Engineering had a weekly live match and I was walking
on air the time he took me down there. He also took me to the local
ballpark to see Dick the Bruiser and Angelo Poffo (father of Macho Man
Randy Savage) take on the Shire Brothers (Roy and Ray -- whatever happened
to these guys?). Another famous wrestler/manager of that era was Bobby
Heenan. Everybody hated Bobby because he was one of those blond-haired
villains who primped and preened and beat up on guys like Lucky Lou
Eisenhower, Wilbur Snyder, and Cowboy Bob Ellis. Anyway, Bobby is one
of the few -- maybe the only wrestler -- to survive and prosper and
be active in the world of wrestling in the year 2000.

During the years he's acquired the nickname "The
Brain" and like everyone he has his own Web site -- except that
he uses Mystery Meat Navigation. The first page is 104,971 bytes and
has, as I mentioned, Mystery Meat Navigation. Although there are text
links at the bottom, they can't be seen on an 800 x 600 screen. The
page also generates a JavaScript error using Netscape 4.04.

Joseph Campbell
Foundation. Yes, I know he was involved in mythology and symbolism,
but the site has gone a little over the edge. Here's the e-mail I received:

This is an example of a web page that tried to be artsy and ended
up fartsy. I have a DSL connection and the intro wouldn't even let
me in for about 45 sec to a 1 min. I can't imagine what a slow modem
would do. The actual links were the last item to appear on the animation
and so you are stuck waiting for some sign from the God's on how to
get into the site.

And next I came upon the interactive site map that is a pleasure
to look at but sucks navigation wise. 49, count 'em...49 saturnic
buttons. This link is the shockwave version that pops up a little
label on mouseover. The next one is even worse....

This is the wave-less counterpart. You have to look at the status
bar to know where you are going and then the actual file names pop
up and not even a description! Have fun finding your way on this one.
Actually I don't think it even works because I end up on the main
page.

My suggestions. Cut out the intro totally. Maybe make the circle
icon on the front page a slow animation. If you do keep the intro.
have a voice over of Campbell himself talking about the power of Myth
as the damn thing is loading. AT LEAST I'll have something to do while
I'm waiting.

As far as the navigation site...I'm so sorry, but that was a huge
waste of time. I literally thought it might be a matching game that
would give me quotes from Campbell if I matched the symbol. But the
first swipe of the mouse led me to write to you.

The links on the left on the main page were the most helpful. I'm
referring to the biographical information about Campbell. The metaphor
and myth I could never quite understand their purpose other than looking
pretty.

I didn't think I would have been disappointed enough in a site to
write to you, but between the intro and the so-called site map, I
couldn't help it.

Bisley Furniture
-- Furniture. Flash. Mystery Meat. Bisley claims they are the UK's largest
manufacturer of office furniture. Well, at least on the home page they
give you the chance to bail out if you don't have Flash installed. However,
the next page is 381K -- just to see some Mystery Meat Navigation and
whatever else they've loaded. It's not worth the trouble to click the
"enter" link.

Portishead.As the person who suggested this site stated: "Seems like I've
been spending a lot of time on music web sites lately, and I know some
artistic license should be allowed, but here is the site for the UK
band "Portishead." How about MMN where all the buttons are the
same! No visual clues at all. AND the flashing cubes will induce seizure!
When you click on an area, check our the cryptic navigation/audio/e-mail
thingy. Oh so un-intuitive! Gotta love artists!

Mystery
Meat from Nine Inch Nails. Yeah, it's a music site and music sites
must be hip so it's "OK" for them to use MMN. I just want
to point out they make it especially evil because when you mouseover
any of the links, no description shows up in the status bar.

Rupert
Hine. Ah, it's another music site (it took forever for me to figure
this out because I'm not familiar with Rupert Hine) that's beautiful
to look at, but exceedingly difficult to navigate. The person who suggested
the site said the pages took forever to load and the first page is 167,925
bytes in size.

MORE MYSTERY MEAT ROLLOVERS! these are so sucky, I think they merit
their own daily sucker award!

And they've got a Mission-Statement home page to boot.

GN
Netcom.Yes, it's cute -- the first time you see it, but
I've seen it before (the Deep Rising movie site a couple of years ago).

Maxim Group.
The original message was much more interesting, but due to certain constraints,
I can only use certain portions of the e-mail message:

Here's a site for a major consulting/contracting firm that has Mystery
Meat rollovers on its homepage. I got to the site from AltaVista,
which listed their location pages first. I figured I'd just click
on one of the links, and there would be a link on those pages to take
me home. Yes, I suppose I could have figured out the home page location
by looking at the URL and deleting the additional stuff, but I never
would have found out how sucky the site really is! So in addition
to Mystery Meat homepage links, they have absolutely NO links back
to the home page inside the site!

Digital Dimensions
-- Bizarre MMN. As the person who suggested the site stated: "This
is like bizzaro-mystery meat. The company uses all these distinct icons
that *look* like navigation, but they all go to the same place. Eventually,
they go nowhere. Check it out -- you'll see."

How's this for the ultimate in Saturnic navigation: the mystery clicks
aren't icons, or even cryptic text, but blocks of color .... And the
game-show announcer voice that asks you to select a color isn't much
help. Of course, this site sucks before you even get to that page
because there is no non-Shockwave alternative.

The cardinal sin of Web design is to design a site only
certain folks can use. On the other hand, this company may have the
attitude "If they are too cheap to upgrade to a free browser, we
don't want to deal with them." They may be right.

On the other hand, a splash page of 168,620 bytes is pretty
excessive, but nothing like the 300,489 bytes of their home page.

Nirvanet.
The folks who designed this site have great skills in many areas --
except navigation. As the person who suggested the site stated:

this site was by far something that i myself could not understand
why designers are still using this method of design. it is not feasible
to me to see so many rollovers in the space of even a half inch square
(i'm referring to the smaller set up in the upper right corner.) at
the beginning, the site looked interesting, but it led to nowhere.
oh, by the way, if by chance you should accidentally roll over the
moving orb (the larger one), watch out...

This is my contribution to the most Mystery Meat-based site - in
more ways than one! the site talks about "Advanced Reality" and is
as pretentious as it can get - and more! The navigation is certainly
"Mysterious" - the first mouseover tells me "here you may find the
latest news". may? so I have to take that chance? One of the inner
pages - doesn't have any links but click on any of the 4 circles
and you get to the same page! Check this
page out for some "bewildering" stuff.

The Automobile Association.
Not only is it MMN, but the images at the top right don't even fit together
correctly. As the person who submitted this site stated, "Not only
have they used MMN design (if you can find the navigation), but they
have placed it exactly where you would expect a banner to be - so it
gets ignored."

I'm referring to the "state of the art" MMN frames version of the
site which pops in a separate window.

It's a nice soothing bland background, but this looks kinda cramped
at 1024X768. Anyway, check out the MMN corners for navigation. I marvel
at what designers think will make sense instead of the actual words!

The site itself I found maddening. I just wanted to see who else
was recording for this label. Of course, there is no site map which
meant going around to *each* letter and seeing what artists were on
the list. And I had to scroll in the frame to boot! because of the
design! Grrrr. More valuable time wasted.

Also - you can buy on-line. Not that you'd ever know this because
it certainly isn't advertised well. The "Buy It!" signals are at the
bottoms of the pages of each release for the artists. Guess they don't
want the hard-earned dollars of the bluegrass-lovin' public.

This is one case where I'd rather have a print copy of their catalog,
or perhaps use the ever-so-slightly-less helpful no-frames version.
Love their stuff. Hate their site.

Moyra's
Web Jewels. As the person who suggested this site stated, "Lots
of MMN rollovers on first page, plus a whole new set on secondary pages.
Pretty, but..."

Fullswing.net
The person who sent in the e-mail had quite a lot to say about this
site and it all seemed right. The person even said the bottom text links
sorta-kinda exonerated it; however, these links don't show up on a graphics
resolution of 800 x 600.

This is the weirdest rollover I have ever seen. Only one of the people
at the top actually has a mouseover event on it - why? We aren't sure....If
you go to that page, you see the next weirdest rollover event as the
little dot turns into a face and goes, where? We aren't sure....This
just sort of continues on and on and on...

Actually, the second
page's use of MMN is cool -- but hard to understand. Each rollover,
when clicked, brings up a new person and a new story about how the University
has helper her/him. On an 800 x 600 window, it's impossible to tell
what's happening, but on a larger resolution you can tell. Still sucks,
though.

The first time I visited it took me a few minutes to realize where
the navigation panel even WAS let alone what everything did... it
consists of a nice graphic with 6 unlabeled buttons that all look
alike near the middle, along with a "?" and a " at " on each end, symbolizing
an "About" page and a mailto link, respectively.

There is a web design section, but when you click on the request
form it says "Sorry, I am not accepting any Web Design requests at
this time." (There's another little quirk for you.. if you're not
accepting them, why ask for them?)

NedStat
Basic. A Eudora-looking web site which has MMN in the bar at the
left.

Hello there, I was quite disappointed to find this saturnic page.
The navigation is very confusing, because it is not even obvious where
the navigation menu is! Of course they decided to throw in the standard
lame infinite loop animated gifs.

I suppose the saturnic flare has reached its way up north, the designer
of the site recently changed their page (it wasn't saturnic before)
to something similarly hard to figure out.

The above site is an experimental art site, so it's a bit unfair
to label it Mystery Meat seeing as they're not selling anything, and
to some extent getting lost is part of the fun. But, for instance,
this site hosts experimental real audio files (mostly seeming to consist
of five minutes of static with the occasional bleep inserted). So,
if I wanted to go back and find a ram file that I'd thought was interesting,
I'd have a bugger of a time finding it. At least most of the corporate
Saturnic sites have rollovers that reveal what the thing leads to
- this site has fancy names like 'epistemology' and 'radio telemetry'.
It's hard to decode which pages lead to the sound files that you want
to hear once you've worked out what the hell the site is about. The
page called 'forking map' is only a map to the extent that all of
the symbols appear on it. It's completely forked.

Web Designers

If these folks didn't start the trend, they continue to propagate it
like the pod people in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."I normally don't critique Web designers, but this trend must be
stopped so I'm willing to name names. What's most annoying about these
sites is, according to the sites I've seen, they don't use MMN on their
clients' sites. Their clients' sites often look "normal" --
nothing like the designers' sites. Hypocrisy? Something's weird.

David
Gary Studios. The man is the God of Flash. I attended a lecture
on "Good Web Design" and this site was held up as an example
of great design. Ironically, just two days prior to the lecture after
I received the following e-mail:

This is the worst Mystery Meat Navigation I've seen.

While this statement may be true, the person who designed
this site is the God of Flash. The site is excessive because
it's experimental. As the lecturer stated, "His Flash skill is
so good, I want to quit." I just went through two (in a series
of three) videotapes on Flash and I have a new appreciation for the
complexities of the program. (I'll never truly "get" Flash
unless I devote my life to it -- fat chance.) It's the MMN in Mystery
Meat Navigation, but it's a lot of fun to look at.

Leo
Burnett -- 101,674 bytes and it's Mystery Meat. Yeah, I know, yet
another design firm -- and a big one -- Leo Burnett. Yes, it's very
cool and slick and all those other great things, but it uses MMN all
over the place. The TV is a perfect example. The message says, "Select
a Channel" but there's no clue until you mouseover the blinking
buttons. It's very pretty and like all designer's sites it's used to
show off their skills. It's still Mystery Meat. Let them keep it on
their site.

Convergence,
Inc. Mystery Meat designer. As the person who suggested this site
stated, "Not only does it use a black screen, but the text is too
small and the titles too dark to read clearly. And of course, to top
it off, yes, MMN."

Some
designer's page (couldn't figure out who the person was).
I usually don't get involved with designers, but I want to point out
that this MMN trend has certainly hit the Web designer ranks. It's OK,
because they're trying to show off their skill set. Just remember, you
don't want it on your commercial site. I have some reasonably strong
links to Indonesia, so this site was quite interesting to me. (Requires
Flash Plug-In)

Unified Media Arts
-- The person who created this site for a Web designer is certainly
a flash wizard, but once you get to the main page, you'll find MMN.
Click on the HTML version and you'll find it even faster. BTW, some
of the rollovers don't work when you use the Netscape Browser. OOPS.

Spyplane. So
many design sites use MMN it isn't funny. Here's another one. As the
person who suggested it stated, "Neat idea that you can change
your layout.. but.. huh?"

Check out the (lack of) navigation buttons on the left. They don't
work. Or, how about the descriptive categories on the right? I was
looking for a DVD player, but hell if I'm going to click on every
GF...and GT... to find it!

unbound studios.
Hey, this site is really cool on my ADSL connection. It's top of the
line Mystery Meat Web design. You have to pick either the low- or high-voltage
Flash page. Check it out.

Eyeball Design.
The first site is courtesy of someone from the most wired country in
the world -- Finland. Plenty of Mystery Meat and the site uses, I believe,
Dynamic HTML.

NRG Design. I can
see why this site was Cool Flash Site of the Day. These folks are Flash
wizards. Unfortunately, in their attempt to be cool, they opted for
MMN.

fensterMEDIA
Normally, if I don't think a site sucks enough I won't run it. However,
the second sucker uses Mystery Meat Navigation, so the Roman Emperor
Vincenzo has to give the thumbs down sign. I like the use of white space
-- there isn't that Amazon.com feel to the site and it doesn't try to
be trendy like so many other sites.

There's the needless splash page which has to go and,
of course, the navigation is pure Mystery Meat. Since it's a design
firm, I assumed the "P" stood for "Portfolio."
Wrong. It stands for "Philosophy" which is another
way of saying Mission Statement (which I hate and have discussed at
length). This Mission Statement isn't too bad and doesn't suffer from
the usual BS you see in most Mission Statements. I found it interesting
that the link to Philosophy didn't work from the portfolio page (they
probably will fix it before you see it).

Of course, there's the portfolio page and I always find
it amusing that designers, more often than not, don't use Mystery Meat
Navigation on their clients' pages. Hmm. The designer is saying, "We'll
be stupid when we design our site, but if you hire us we won't be stupid
when we design your site."

Whoa! The frontpage must qualify as mystery meat....even though they've
labeled the bottom corner "come in" it takes a while to realize that
you need to click the purple patch to get in. Subsequent pages are
all solid graphics, no html at all (except for <HTML> and <TABLE>
tags. It seems that they tried to keep file sizes down but in doing
so made most of their text seem out of focus...check it out..you'll
be pleasantly disappointed.

Amazing
Online Marketing! -- Three strikes and it's 25-to-life. Here in
California, we've got a three strikes law where people can win 25 years-worth
of free room and board if they commit three felonies (or something like
that -- I haven't paid too much attention). Well this design firm has
three strikes -- Splash page, Mystery Meat Navigation, and a Mission
Statement. Let's talk about each of them.

Splash Page. I picture myself in a room of kids
and I'm yelling, "If I've told you kids once, I've told you a hundred
times -- no splash pages!" It doesn't add anything, it gets in
the way, and search engines don't like them -- many of them give extra
weight to the root page and if it's a splash page, you'll be penalized.

Mission Statement. Before Chris Rock was a famous
comedian, he was an unknown comedian who summed up what a bunch of politicians
said at a town hall meeting as, "All babies must eat." An
obvious truism that says nothing. This design firm should have kept
the first sentence -- "Amazing has been designing and implementing
successful Web sites and online applications since 1995" and killed
the rest of the page. Mission statements are clichés such as,
"We focus on topnotch design work" -- like I'm expecting you
to specialize in crappy design? Or, "We listen to you." Isn't
that stupid. I expect you to listen to me.

A Mission statement tells the world how great you
are. Your potential customer doesn't give a left-handed flying farkle
about you. His/her only concern is, "What are you going
to do for me?" Remember, the client is only interested in
me, me, me, me, and me. S/he doesn't care about you. When I reviewed
a bunch of business
school web sites for a major magazine, my favorite was the one who
had on the front page, "Our graduates start out at $82,000 a year
(or some such extravagant sum). The business school understood what
was important -- how much money someone would make if they enrolled.

If for reasons known but to God you happen to need a mission
statement, use the Dilbert
Zone Mission Statement Generator. Unfortunately, it isn't tied to
the Web design business, but it still cranks out some funny stuff.

Mobius
New Media. -- Someone who's doing Mystery Meat right --I know it
sounds like an oxymoron, but someone is actually doing Mystery Meat
the right way -- as an option. Mobius New Media's home page offers three
ways to navigate the site -- low bandwidth, high bandwidth (slightly
blurred home page, but more blurred on the inside plus the links are
sideways -- bad), and Flash (which should tell you something). All you
high-end designers, who are using mystery meat, should see how it can
be done right. Why is it right? Because there are obvious options on
a page that's 74K (a touch on the high side, but rated "fair"
by WebSite Garage).

Coda

One of the many visitors sent me an e-mail that brilliantly sums up
the evil that is MMN.

Got it--now I understand what Saturnic is. Blind,
unlabeled navigation you have to mouseover to get a clue, as opposed
to navigation bars/buttons with symbols, which I also find to be not
only annoying, but arrogant.

I agree with you totally--this new style is so stupid
from a business decision standpoint, especially seeing it on major
business sites, that it's troublesome how corporate execs are even
allowing this.

I think what I'll do now with my business is change
my answering machine as follows:

"You've reached XYZ Corporation. To find out what
option #1 is, press 1. To find out what option #2 is, press 2. (Etc....)
If you'd like to continue doing business with our company after we've
slapped you around and wasted your valuable time, press 9". Makes
sense, huh? And it's cool, too, since it weeds out undesirable customers
who would only waste our time, because if people aren't smart enough
to guess what various services we offer by knowing who we are, then
we don't want their business, because they can't possibly have any
money to buy our products or services.

And we should change all highway navigation signs,
too, to be kewl like these new web designers. Instead of having the
common green road signs we're accustomed to on freeways with writing
on them, they should be big, blank road signs with nothing but reflective
numbered buttons on them. When you drive by, you press a keypad on
your steering wheel and an audio message tells you what Button #1
said on the roadsign (i.e. "turn left in 1 mile to exit for 43rd St.")
Then to find out what Buttons 2 & 3 said, you have to exit, turn around,
and drive by again. Now that would be kewl, (and smart)!